Sharing with Developers

[divvymyride]

Guys,
I have a beginners question for you.
I am trying to recruit some help from a 3rd party to build my site
divvymyride.com as I don’t have hard core development skills.
how do I allow development on my site without giving access to the main login and passwords.
I created a developer login and password for an ftp account, but they would still need access to data bases etc.
Any help or pointer would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
Mayank.

[felgall]

If you set up the database for them then they can write their own scripts to load the information needed into the database. See http://www.felgall.com/cpanel1.htm for the part you'd have to do first. You then just give them the database name, user, and password (the first two have accountname_ on the front) and they can upload and run whatever scripts they need to set up the database.

[divvymyride]

Thanks Stephen,
I think this would be the way to go. and for the rest I will create a subdirectory to which the developers can ftp and upload.

[felgall]

The would be my recommendation since that way they are limited to the one folder and one database that they can access so that they can't do anything to anything else in your account.

[DanR]

http://www.felgall.com/img/sqlwiz3.gif

Do you select "All Privileges"?

[felgall]

Yes you do if you want them to be able to have full access to set up the database for you. Provided that you create a new database for that domain and don't try to use the same database for several domains, giving the developer full access to that database is reasonable.

[DanR]

Okay I'm having problems. I'm trying to make it so other people can go on, but I type in the Username and Password. But it just keeps popping up telling me to put it in again. Am I doing something wrong? I know I have the username and password right and I set it up how you said.

Thats for this page: h ttp://69.89.31.209:2082/3rdparty/phpMyAdmin/index.php

Thanks.

[felgall]

The username and password to access phpMyAdmin are the same ones you use for cPanel, not the ones you set up for a specific database.

[DanR]

I'm confused. How do Developers access the databases then? Like MySQL.

[felgall]

By writing scripts that contain the necessary database commands, uploading them, and then running them.

[DanR]

By writing scripts that contain the necessary database commands, uploading them, and then running them.

I'm still a bit lost. Where do you upload them to though? FTP?

[felgall]

You set up:

1. A separate database - and supply the developer with the database name, userid and password.
2. A separate FTP account that has access only to the folder where the site is that the developer will be creating. You provide the developer with the access details for this account.

The developer then writes the code and scripts needed to create the site and uses the FTP account to upload everything to the folder where it belongs. For everything they need to initialise in the database they can create an install.php script that when run will create all the tables that the site needs and populate any necessary values.

If they are installing a pre-written script for you then that script will already have its own install page included with the script.

Having an install script means that when testing the code the developer can simply rerun the install script after each series of tests in order to restore the database back to its original state.

The only way you could set up phpmyadmin access for the developer would be to install your own copy onto your account and configure that to allow access to only the one database. If you know enough to do that then you wouldn't need a developer to develop the site for you because you'd be able to do a much better job of it yourself.